Sex and the Hidden Village
by coincident
Summary: The Konoha kunoichi's dating scene, as explained by its discontents.


A/N: I'm writing a Sex-and-the-City style expo of my university for a sociology project (yes, you read that right) and so to get in the 'zone,' I churned out some Konohadating!cliches while sitting at the bus stop and tried to emulate the addictive style of Candace Bushnell, who did the original Sex and the City. I thought the result was kind of funny, so I put it up. Enjoy!

I don't own it.

~X~

**WHEN A TRAINING SPAR IS JUST A TRAINING SPAR  
**

Let me tell you a story every Konoha kunoichi learns by heart, the very same day she graduates from the academy and straps on her first pair of specialty Spanx shuriken holsters.

I have this friend, Hinata Hyuuga. She's gorgeous--the kind of gorgeous that puts least two of her most useful jutsu are right up in your face, if you get what I mean--she's sweet, she makes homemade herbal ointment in her spare time, she's got hair that goes on for as long as and shines brighter than her Hyuuga pedigree, she doesn't have halitosis, she keeps her nose and her kunai clean. Hinata Hyuuga glitters in the sunlight like a moronic plot device. Hinata Hyuuga is the kind of girl civilians write rock songs about. Hinata Hyuuga should make Hokage someday, just because it'd turn our monument into the sexiest damn rock this side of Suna and boost our tourism revenue by five hundred percent or more.

Hinata Hyuuga is Facebook-stalk-fixated on Naruto Uzumaki. I would comment on that, but I can't, because nobody really understands why it's the case and given Hinata's ability to literally look underneath the underneath (read: through clothes) combined with the fact that this is _Naruto, _nobody really wants to know anyway. But the important thing is, one day Hinata was out on the town and encountered the man of the moment at his favorite roadside hangout, the infamous watering hole that calls itself the Ichiraku Ramen bar. He talked while she put her wiles to the test, and understand, since this is Hinata, she's in possession of enough wiles to fill an Icha-Icha or seven, even if she doesn't exactly understand how to use them. But they seemed to work on Naruto, and within forty-five minutes, she had herself a "training spar"--with the boy at the lower training grounds, ostensibly to practice resisting the Jyuuken.

Yeah, right. The Jyuuken. Sure, there would be some Gentle Fisting going on, but he wasn't exactly going to be resisting, if you get what I'm saying.

So Hinata put on her Kunoichi Style: Silk Temptress! panties and left the Spanx shuriken holsters behind, and even invested in that pricey blood-resistant foundation for the occasion. She showed up at the lower training grounds with her own lower training ground tightening in anticipation of the wonderful things she and Naruto were going to do, which would probably involve anything in the five countries other than practicing resisting the Jyuuken.

Guess what Naruto wanted to do?

That's right. He wanted to practice resisting the Jyuuken.

"I just don't get it," Hinata told me later on. "I didn't even wear my shuriken holsters. When a girl comes to train with you and she's not wearing her shuriken holsters, you should get the point. That's like throwing off all your clothes and screaming 'Take me!'" She fell silent, lost in horror that this sentence had actually come out of her mouth. Then she recovered out of sheer bewilderment at Naruto's cluelessness. "Seriously, Sakura," she asked. "What did I do wrong?"

What did she do wrong? She's a Konoha kunoichi trying to have a normal dating life. She shouldn't even have to ask.

**SUNNING AT THE GENE POOL  
**

My friend Ino Yamanaka is a kekkei-genkai gold digger. She likes her men well endowed--with a bloodline limit.

"They think it's about their looks," she tells me in her family's florist shop, frowning at a flower that's had its head lopped off by some passing civilian elephant. "It's not about their looks. It's about their bloodlines. Hyuuga. Uchiha. Names that make you hot."

She is hot. In all ways. These days, she spends most of her time tanning on the roof with her teammate Shikamaru--well, she tans, and he sleeps. When she's kvetching, I ask her why she doesn't make the obvious choice and settle for her rooftop buddy rather than some bloodline man-candy, and she scoffs at me.

"Listen, forehead-girl, we're kunoichi," she says. "Ordinary women bag penthouses and sparkly crap. We bag the big dogs--literally in some cases, because the Inuzukas, coarse and nouveau-riche as they are, do technically have their own kekkei genkai. I keep telling Hinata; that beast clone technique is really worth looking into."

Ino says it's easy to catch the Hyuugas' eyes--size does matter, and I don't know if you've heard, but their vision field is huge. But she seems to have hit the blind spot thus far with all the Hyuugas she's encountered, which admittedly isn't many.

"Branch family members run like civilians every time they see a girl on the warpath," she says. "They don't want to pass on their genes. And frankly, I'm not surprised. But if Neji really thinks he's never going to let his bird out of the cage, well, let's just say he's never met me. My mind-control technique could have him on his back in a few seconds flat."

If it weren't for those pearly whites of theirs (two sets each, natch), the Hyuugas really wouldn't be Ino's style at all. She's more into dark-eyed, dark-haired, dark-hearted bastards--and in our town, when you say that, you're talking Uchiha. But Ino admits that pickings have been pretty slim on that front since Itachi decided to up the ante on competition among Konoha's Uchiha-chasers, and believe me, there are a lot of Uchiha-chasers.

"Come on! The entire clan?" says Ino incredulously. "Really? He couldn't have left maybe a couple of stragglers alive? Where am I supposed to get my Uchiha chromosomes now that Sasuke's left for skankier pastures?"

Mixed metaphors aside, she has a point, and if she never had enough reasons to hate the Uchiha slaughterer before, she definitely nurses a grudge for the fact that he took away her opportunity to ever nurse anything else Uchiha. She will have her revenge. But if Itachi ever decides to come back, she says, all bets are off. More than one kunoichi's got Itachi's mug shot from the bingo book tacked up in her cubicle, and it's not because she's dedicated to her job.

There are a lot of people who say Ino and kunoichi like her give a bad name to women all over Konoha, especially since Ino turned fifteen and her bandages came off. But Ino knows what to say to them, and she's said it on more occasions than I care to count.

"When you're a kunoichi in Konoha, life's short and love's a myth. You do what you can."

And I know what she means, because when love goes missing-nin on you, what else are you supposed to do?

**MY SCROLL IS BIGGER THAN THEIRS**

Tenten's got it made as far as kunoichi are concerned. She's ANBU at seventeen, she lets us take vamp shots in her cat mask and that sexy stealth ANBU-issue uniform, and she eats her ramen with senbon instead of chopsticks. Tenten signs autographs for adoring little girls. She took a group at the Academy out to lunch last year and Tsunade-shishou has a fantastic picture of all of them, clustered around her face on the monument and yelling "I'm next!" as their camera-catchphrase. Tenten looks as good in heels as she does in jonin sandals. She can do things in both that would make your head spin--in two very different ways, of course. She wears her hair up and her skirts down, and when she walks by on the street, women nudge their sons and alphabetize baby names in their heads.

Men won't touch her.

"The problem is that they're intimidated by all these weapons, Sakura," she says as Shizune helps us with our nails. She's got a fortified clear coat on so that it won't chip, but she still ends up back here having to retouch it every few days. "Back at the Academy, it was all, oh Tenten, I love a girl with a weapon, oh Tenten, your blades are hot. Yeah, right. The second their testosterone catches up with their mouths, they're out of there. They just can't take this on. It makes them feel emasculated." She nods at her scroll, propped up behind her.

Tenten has a lot of weapons scrolls with more than their fair share of goodies inside, and every kunoichi on the street can tell you that when someone says "Those suckers are huge" in relation to Tenten, they're not talking about body parts. Men run when they see those things.

"I just wish someone had told me how scared shinobi are of being overpowered by someone shooting stuff at them out of oblong objects!" snaps Tenten. "What are we, twelve?"

But when we actually were twelve, no one really seemed to care. Tenten famously trained with the Neji Hyuuga, after all, and everyone knows that his tolerance for females is akin to his teammate's much-advertised tolerance for sake. But Neji, after taking advantage of her training skills and stamina, left her feeling violated, abused, and hurting all over from his hakke-hands-of-death.

"Civilian men use you for your body, and so do shinobi," says Tenten, unrolling a smaller scroll and summoning an emory board. "It's just in a different way. They want a training partner and a teammate who's good on missions and won't bring their drama to the battlefield. We've been through everything with our boys, so they don't see us as females anymore."

But Tenten is wrong. They see her as a female more than she knows, especially when she jumps up the ANBU ranks like the cat she wears as her insignia, or when she nails more targets than even Neji can actually see with those eyes of his. They see her as a female then.

That's why like so many other kunoichi, Tenten, porcelain-faced with her mask or without it, still can't get herself a date.

~X~

A/N: Should I continue? That's up to you :)


End file.
